Cropping - does this save bitrate??

[mfrancis123]

I've been cropping down letterboxed images in TMPG and then applying them to a 640*480 window to view on my standalone DVD player. This works great and I'm happy with the results. My question is does TMPG apply the bitrate to only the cropped portion when encoding or is bitrate still wasted on the black that takes up the rest of the window? I tried encoding at 640 *272 or 352 for different aspects but my DVD player (Panasonic 31K) moves the entire image to the top of the screen instead of centering it. Just to be clear the crop window is only showing the image but the output has the letterboxing.

Thanks

[ApacheWraith]

Make sure you're setting it to 4:3 AR when you encode. Changing resolution has no effect on bitrate. You can try to use a VBR to maybe save some space on movies with few action sequences, but the final file will vary depending on the movie.

What encoding program are you using?

ApacheWraith

[ApacheWraith]

Nevermind about the encoding program question, I must've missed you saying TMPGEnc. Under RATE CONTROL MODE choose automatic VBR or 2 Pass VBR and you should be able to set a high BR a minimum BR and and average BR, this should give you a pretty close estimate to what the final size will be, oh BTW set the average to what your BR calculator says should be average for a given number of minutes per cd.

Hope this helps some

ApacheWraith

[mfrancis123]

Sorry I tried to make it clear, I'm happy with the bitrate I'm using. I'm just trying to find out if the bitrate is applied only to the cropped image (ie. 640 * 272) or to the entire output which is 640*480? I always use CBR because I don't think that VBR works with my DVD player for XVCD?

Thanks,

[ApacheWraith]

Ok that I'm not sure. I'm definately not qualified to answer your question, sorry about the misunderstanding.....

Apache